Archives for October 2012

It’s the favoured statistic of fear-mongers everywhere. 1 in 4 of us will experience a mental health problem in the course of a year. 1 in 4 women will experience domestic violence at some point in their life. In the United States, according to one campaign group, 1 in 4 college women have survived rape or attempted rape. According to another group, 1 in 4 people in Ireland experience sexual abuse. And in the UK too. As the aptly-named One in Four UK has it: ‘Research has consistently shown that one in four children will experience sexual abuse before the age of 18’.

Research? I objected this weekend to an item in which a necessarily hysterical spokesperson for the child protection lobby repeated this ‘research’ in the context of the ongoing Savile witch-hunt. The implication being not only that abuse is very prevalent but that it is of the vile predatory paedophile kind. Of course, as I hope most of us realise, neither of these things are true. The after-the-fact pursuit of Savile, an allegedly despicable pervert who after his death looks every bit the dirty old man, has only confirmed the no less perverse dynamics brought into being by child abuse hysteria. Still one Twitter-follower objected – and maybe not all that unreasonably given the disorienting climate of suspicion – ‘if you know the real figure (as you clearly think you do), now would be a good time to share it’. Which I did. You see while I would prefer to trust that most of us don’t suspect our friends and family of abusing their kids, there comes a time when you have to counter a bad stat with one that has some substance to it.

So here goes. At the end of March 2011, the latest period for which the Department for Education collects statistics, there were 42,700 children in England subject to a child protection plan. That is 42,700 children out of a mid-2010 total estimated at 11,045,400 0-17 year olds. If you do the maths that comes to 0.38658%. You may have noticed that this is rather less than 1 in 4. But what does being subject to a child protection plan, or what used to be called being on the child protection register, actually mean? It means that local authorities are sufficiently concerned that a child may be at risk of neglect or abuse that a social worker and various other professionals are investigating the case to decide what, if any, action to take. And what is meant by abuse? In most cases (42.5%) there is a strong suspicion of child neglect rather than abuse per se; most other cases being one’s of suspected emotional abuse (27.3%) or physical abuse (13%). The DfE Statistical Release doesn’t even mention sexual abuse as a category. Such is its rarity.

Just to be clear. Far from confirming the much-cited 1 in 4 rate of child abuse, the DfE figures show that less than half a percent of children in England are even suspected of being subject to neglect or emotional or physical abuse. And there is an even smaller chance that they are suspected of being sexually abused. No doubt child abuse campaigners will argue that this is just the tip of the iceberg. They always do. Or maybe, like the campaigners against domestic abuse, they will claim that the definition of abuse isn’t wide enough. As I might have said to my Twitter-critic even when you do have the evidence with which to rubbish the dodgy stats produced by those who have already made up their twisted minds; it won’t convince them. The cultural imagination that produces the kind of Savile-related hysteria we have been witness to over recent days and weeks is deeply ingrained. Having the facts on your side is only one part of the battle. The other is to ask why influential sections of society find it so easy to believe 1 in 4 of our children are being abused in the first place?

I have recently come to the conclusion that nothing does what it says on the tin any more. Or at least what is written on the tin has ceased to have much to do with what’s in it. This has particularly come to mind over the past week. There was the announcement that, at last, there will be an inquest into the shooting of Mark Duggan which supposedly ‘triggered’ last year’s riots. A report making the case for local authorities to raid their employees’ pension funds in order to boost housebuilding, was another prompt. And then there was the story about how Cancer Research UK was voted the most popular charity ‘brand’, with the likes of Greenpeace, Oxfam and Amnesty International not far behind.

What struck me the most about the latest riots-related news was, first of all, this idea that Duggan’s death in some way caused the riots. I don’t think it did in any meaningful sense. It is perhaps better to understand what happened as akin to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. The events were connected but almost arbitrarily so. But in the absence of anything else, it seems to have become the stand-in for an explanation for something that was quite inexplicable and unexpected. While apologists for the rioters have talked up the poverty, lack of opportunities and poor relations with the police, none of these while attendant factors explain anything. While I don’t accept as some have argued that they weren’t riots at all – according to my dictionary a riot is a ‘noisy disturbance by a crowd’ – they were fundamentally lacking in any sort of content. The violent public display (what was written on the tin) rang hollow. Not that this stopped commentators, politicians and academics – no less opportunistically than the rioters themselves – hurriedly projecting their pet theories onto what were meaningless, if no less serious for that, outbursts.

The world of housing policy, not known for its outbursts of activity – as the absence of housebuilding attests – has also been failing the Ronseal test for some time now. The latest wheeze in an increasingly desperate attempt to boost ‘affordable’ housing and inject some life into an inflated yet standstill housing market, only confirms this. While all sorts of bad ideas from blaming under-occupiers and those with second homes for the housing crisis, to creating new confusing mixes of traditional tenures, are entertained by those hopelessly steeped in bricks ‘n’ mortar jargon; they seem not to notice that housing policy is no longer about housing as such. Social landlords, for instance, don’t build houses any more. They like to be known as ‘community builders’. They are providers of social services, on the one hand, ‘supporting’ their allegedly vulnerable tenants, and getting heavy on the other, policing the anti-social ones. According toDavid Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, ‘the mission is to improve people’s lives, to help them fulfil their potential, to support their aspirations and to create functioning and healthy communities’. Even if that was all all very well – which it isn’t – that’s not what it says on the tin.

The charity world, by way of contrast, has been guilty less of mission creep than of a complete absence of mission. Which is ironic when you think about it. The association of the very notion of charity with the religious orders of missionaries who sought to spread the word; or with the pious reformers of the 19th Century at home penalising and patronising as much as helping the poor, may not be entirely flattering. But it is a reminder of a time when there was no doubt as to the message. Today’s charities evidently have a great deal of difficulty articulating what it is they stand for. There are a number of reasons for this. The reliance of many, particularly the most well-known, charities on the state with regards both their funding and policy agendas, are foremost among them. But it is the absence of that desire to meet desperate need that led Dr Barnardo to create a school for the East End’s orphaned and homeless children; or of that sense of outrage at the filmic depiction of homelessness in Cathy Come Home that led to the creation of Shelter.

Its not that we lack social problems. While grinding poverty and child destitution are largely problems of the past, there are a few good causes I can think of that don’t get the attention they deserve. Whether its campaigning for real development rather than the so-called sustainable development that world’s poorest typically get, or in defence of those scientists and institutions experimenting on animals in the interests of medical science. Whatever you deem to be a good cause I urge you next time somebody rattles a tin – or in the case of a chugger, their clipboard – in your direction to enquire as to its contents. Not literally, but what is it that they are campaigning for and why should you help them with it? The same goes for Orr and the housing sector. If you are no longer about building and managing the housing stock but would rather manage tenants’ lives, then whose going to solve our housing problem? And if we are to make sense of what happened last summer then we need to get to grips with the mismatch between the rioters’ vandalism of their communities and the worthy excuses. I’m sure there are other similar wood-treatment products out there but only the Ronseal test will get us any closer to making sure that riots, housing associations and charities do what they say on the tin.

Maybe its because I’ve hit 40 that I’ve developed this ‘what is the world coming to?’ response to much of what I hear in the news. You know the feeling? Its similar to the one when you don’t recognise any of the celebs on the front of Hello! magazine any more; or when you really can’t tell one boy band from another, and are genuinely shocked by the goings-on on Geordie Shore. But maybe its not me, its you. Or them?

It all started with the relentlessly destructive dynamic of the past few weeks’ Jimmy Savile hysteria. The abuse done to our sense of normality, to our ability to get a bit of perspective on things. The BBC apparently admitting all without quite knowing what it was accused of. Then there was the news that the European Court of Human Rights may force us to give prisoners the vote. Some supposedly liberal types thought this a wonderful idea. Not for democracy but for the rehabilitation of prisoners! And the interrogation of Emma Harrison, former chair of the much-maligned A4E, by Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel 4 News has been doing the rounds on YouTube. The interviewer’s Paxman-like demolition of this former beneficiary of the payment-by-results Work Programme has been much applauded. The Programme itself came out of it relatively unscathed, despite the revelation that millions of public money was spent on getting less than 4 of 100 long-term unemployed into work.

These three stories may sound like they have nothing to do with each other. But they are of a kind in as far as each features the increasingly shaky relationship some of us seem to have with what it means to be an adult. So what really bothered me about Harrison was not her past at A4E but how she played the victim in that interview. She accused Guru-Murthy of bullying her. What irked most about those ‘liberal’ campaigners for prisoner votes is that they were unable to tell the difference between free citizens having the right to exercise that freedom at the polls, and the unfreedom implied by the imprisonment of those who fail to live up to society’s agreed minimum standards. With Savile it was less his alleged abuse of children, than the failure of his detractors to even entertain the notion that allegations against a dead man recollected by adults who were children at the time, do not imply that the BBC, and society at large, is really a giant paedophile ring.

The trawling of 70s and 80s childhoods and the corridors of the BBC for dark tales of unimaginable deeds; the turning of democracy, and the hard won right to vote, into a not very promising therapy for convicts; the appeal to one’s own vulnerability when cornered by a journalist and asked to account for one’s actions; are each testament to the fact that increasingly acting like a grown-up and demanding to be treated as such, has gone out of fashion. We are actively diminished by each of these events, as capable, autonomous adults, deserving of each other’s respect. Trusting that we are not a society of abusers and victims, not turning one bad case into the proverbial and all too chilling ‘tip of the iceberg’; and having self-respect enough not to feel bullied when somebody says something we don’t like, are the sorts of qualities every wannabe grown-up should aspire to. If we don’t rediscover what it means to be a grown-up pretty soon I fear things could really get out of hand. Oh, they already have.

This is an edited version of my contribution to a debate on Saturday, part of the After the Riots strand at the Battle of Ideas festival held at the Barbican, London.

I didn’t see the previous debates in this strand. My wife is expecting our first child so I have been in Antenatal class all day. I wouldn’t have mentioned it except that being a parent – or being a ‘good’ parent – seems to have more than a personal significance these days. Especially after the riots. Bad parents, problem families, or the ‘troubled families’ discussed this morning, were quickly blamed. Or else patronised by those claiming to want to ‘support’ them.

I don’t know what he had to say this morning, but I was pleased, shortly after the riots, to hear David Lammy say what a number of us had been banging on about for a while. Parents feel undermined by a political class that tells them how to bring up their kids; or in the case of smacking, how not to. Sadly he went and spoilt it all a few weeks ago when he blamed knife crime on absent fathers. Or was it absent fathers on knife crime? It doesn’t make much sense either way.

The tendency to indulge young adults’ very violent tantrums no doubt came up this morning too. But it is this notion that grown-ups just aren’t very grown up any more – that the previous debate focused on – that is a good way into this debate on communities. Adults don’t seem to have the authority they once had: whether it’s bringing up their children or holding the line against riotous youth. It is this crisis of authority that in my view created the conditions for last year’s riots, and continues to make an effective community response so very difficult.

I’m no localist but I was none too pleased to discover that my adopted neighbourhood of Walthamstow had been destroyed. Not by the riots – there was a bit of looting, but nothing too serious – but by the Boundary Commission. While the places we live – they are hardly communities really – tend to be anonymous and disengaging, especially in London, most of us still don’t like unwanted interventions and impositions from outsiders. So, while we barely talk to each other, I still resent the prospect of me and my fellow Stowians being divided up between neighbouring Leyton and Chingford as is proposed. On the non-parochial plus-side I also get a kick out of people sticking up for their communities.

So when around 1,000 residents of Clapham Junction arrived on their riot-hit streets armed with their brooms this was rightly celebrated after the events of the previous nights. It made a nice change to see communities taking the initiative where the authorities had failed. They were out there all big society-style and without the usual complaint about the impact of cuts that we’re used to hearing from the so-called community sector. The organised chaos of the rioters was shocking, but it was heart-warming to hear how those residents organised their own response quite literally overnight. Where the rioters used their blackberries, these residents used Twitter via #riotcleanup.

But there was still something not quite right. This ‘sense of community’ lasted only as long as the riots were deemed to be a threat. Once the police had regained what was left of their badly diminished authority on the streets of Tottenham, Hackney, Croydon and elsewhere; everybody went back home and got back to their socially detached lives. Still it was nice while it lasted and it wasn’t another consultant-led initiative claiming to be community-centred and bottom-up, when it is nothing of the sort.

I have in mind, for instance, the response to the burning down of the House of Reeves in Croydon. A family-run furniture store that had stood there for 140 years became one of the iconic burnt-out images of the riots. A year later the Reverse Riots campaign – run by the state-sponsored youth volunteering outfit vInspired – decided to plaster the remaining building with what The Guardian describes as ‘more than 4,000 images of young people holding positive statements’. That’s it. I have no idea what those positive statements were, because even The Guardian (a newspaper that tends to like this sort of thing) couldn’t be bothered to read out any of those messages. It was just another vacuous and uninspired ‘lets say nice things about young people’ initiative.

But there are good examples too. Personally I like pop-ups that don’t over-claim or take themselves too seriously. The likes of Sing London and Ping! England. Pianos and table-tennis tables just popping-up for no particular reason in public places. Really fun ideas that trust people not to nick the table tennis bats or the pianos for that matter. Table-tennis tables popped-up in Walthamstow during the Olympics; and last time I looked they were still there and being used. But the connection with The Games meant that they also became associated with the desperation for a ‘legacy’. Not just an East London legacy, but a feel-good legacy. In a way, the Games themselves were treated as one massive ‘pop-up’ response to the riots. According to The Independent they were an opportunity to regroup around a ‘common purpose’. But as Zoe Williams, who also spoke earlier today, put it: ‘We can’t hold an Olympics every year’.

The world of the pop-up community is very different to the cloth-capped communities of old. In the absence of a sturdier or more deep-rooted solidarity, we seem to be scrambling around to capture what are manifestations of a very impermanent sense of community. From the riots of 2011 to London 2012, every event becomes a pop-up vehicle. Every genuine sentiment, whether it’s that of the clean-up volunteers or of the Games Makers, is deadened by officialdom’s desperation to capture it.

In an interview with BBC News, Nick Hurd, Minister for Civil Society, talked about the importance of the response to the riots, of the Jubilee and London 2012. With remarkably frank cynicism he said the government wants to ‘tap-in’ to these events. He was being interviewed about the recently launched We will gather website. Built by the people who brought us #riotcleanup, and paid for with £100,000 of government money; it is only the latest attempt to bottle that community spirit. While I wish them well I think this is an impossible task, especially when officialdom gets so eagerly involved.

But we needn’t be so cynical ourselves; there is still life in the pop-up community. I’ll leave you with an example. Last week I read about the Battle of Barnet. (This has nothing to do with the Battle of Ideas, by the way.) In contrast with the vInspired House of Reeves pop-up, this Guardian story featuring a ‘hotchpotch alliance of squatters, retired booksellers, local bloggers and international anti-capitalist activists’, is genuinely inspiring. Not the sort of people that I would ordinarily have much time for admittedly. But this was different. They had just succeeded in preventing Barnet Council from closing a library. They had turned the big society tables on the infamous no-frills ‘Easy Jet’ Council. It is now being run, reportedly, by a ‘volunteer staff of guerilla librarians’ and supported by residents who have ‘donated 5,000 books to restock the shelves’. Now that’s my kind of pop-up community. And the volunteers even run ‘children’s story sessions’. Maybe I’ll move to Barnet.

I was recently at University College London to hear a talk on behaviour change. “Nudging methods … have become increasingly popular” read the blurb. “Underlying all of this, however, is the nagging question of whether it is ethical, desirable or sustainable to be nudging people in a desired direction.” Indeed. “Or, is it a case of technological fudging, where we may be covering over deeper problems?”. Well, yes it is, I thought.

So imagine my disappointment when I discovered that far from addressing these important questions, the only mention of fudge was when it was passed around to the easily-nudged and apparently infantilised students packed into the lecture theatre. There was no questioning of whether it is really the business of academics and policy-makers to be finding ever more ‘innovative’ ways of engineering a society of individuals dutifully “eating better, exercising more, or reducing our energy consumption”. There was only excitement at the ingenious inventions which Professor Rogers, whose talk it was, and her many peers working in this faddish field of behavioural economics and social psychology, were coming up with to make us do these things.

Whether it was the ‘fun’ musical stairs or foot-shaped floor-lighting designed to lure people away from using lifts and escalators, or the ‘power aware’ cord designed to make people feel guilty about their use of electrical appliances in the home, nobody bothered to ask whether this sort of thing is really a good idea. Whether it was the scannable (and ‘playful’) smiley-face attached to your shopping trolley that gets sadder as you pile in allegedly unhealthy or excessively globe-trotting food; or the Tidy Street project in Brighton that turned the asphalt into a giant graph displaying residents’ energy consumption, nobody seemed to wonder what right they had to make these sorts of interventions.

Are we really so horrendously overweight and unable to make up our own minds about how we get around that we’d rather build cities that require us to expend more effort rather than making life more convenient? Have we really given up on the notion of developing technologies that might solve the energy problem in favour of resigning to becoming slaves to petty energy-saving gimmicks? Isn’t it one of the wonders of modern living that we’re able to eat food from around the world all year round? The only doubt raised was around the dreaded ‘boomerang effect’ where people just don’t do what the behaviour-changers want them to.

The ‘desired behaviour’ – by who exactly? – is stubbornly resisted as the object of the nudge still can’t help but regard themselves as a subject. Even if it is a matter of deciding whether to have fish and chips rather than a salad, as rational and notionally free individuals we still can’t help but recoil at the suggestion that we don’t know what’s good for us. For the truth is that for all their protestations to the contrary the nudgers are not helping us to make decisions, they are seeking to make decisions for us. They have already decided what the ‘desired behaviour’ must be.

The only thing that concerns the behaviour-changer is what technique or method they should employ to bring about that behaviour. The idea of personal autonomy or that we might have the capacity, or even the right, to make decisions for ourselves or run our own lives doesn’t even seem to occur to them. So when I asked Rogers whether she was perhaps being a little patronising or that, for all the pettiness of the interventions, there might be something authoritarian about all this behaviour-changing and nudging, she seemed surprised. “If it works and we’re able to show an impact why not?”, she asked.

As she herself admitted the Tidy Street project didn’t really work. Only two residents 6 months after the project had ended changed their energy consumption behaviour. But that’s not why I have a problem with nudging. You might think that this miserable failure to get the desired results might lead to a questioning of the nudge-paradigm; or to the conclusion that their time could be better spent on something of use to society. But no, for Roberts it only justified the next stage in the research: to find ways of sustaining ‘desired behaviours’ when the behaviour-nudging researchers are not around.

It was only at the end of her talk that she held out the possibility – on behalf of students too starved of a culture of intellectual enquiry to ask the question themselves – that perhaps treating people like children is a bit ‘sneaky’. She even conceded in response to my question that debate is a good thing. But I think we have very different ideas of what this means. I certainly don’t mean yet another technical discussion between proponents of behaviour-change about the best way of doing it. Instead what we’re badly in need of is a very public battle of ideas that lives up to the promise of that wholly misleading blurb. Which reminds me, I’ll be taking part in the Battle of Ideas on Saturday 20 October and discussing Pop-up communities: here to stay? at the Barbican, London.

Dave Clements Limited

I am a writer and consultant with over fifteen years experience working in senior strategic, management, project and engagement roles, and advising local government, the NHS and other public sector and VCS organisations. I am available for commissions.